page_title: Ghost town
section_title: Asia
hierarchical_section_title: Ghost town / Around the world / Asia
caption_attribution_description: English: The center of Namie is a ghost town, Namie, Fukushima Pref., Japan 12 April, 2011 (VOA - S. L. Herman)
context_page_description: A ghost town or alternatively deserted city or abandoned city is an abandoned village, town, or city, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it has failed, or due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, prolonged droughts, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, pollution, or nuclear disasters. The term can sometimes refer to cities, towns, and neighbourhoods that are still populated, but significantly less so than in past years; for example, those affected by high levels of unemployment and dereliction.
  Some ghost towns, especially those that preserve period-specific architecture, have become tourist attractions. Some examples are Bannack in the United States, Barkerville in Canada, Craco in Italy, Kolmanskop in Namibia, Pripyat in Ukraine, and Danushkodi in India.
  The town of Plymouth on the Caribbean island of Montserrat is a ghost town that is the de jure capital of Montserrat. It was rendered uninhabitable by volcanic ash from an eruption of the Soufrière Hills Volcano.
context_section_description: China has many large urban property developments, sometimes referred to as "ghost cities", that have remained mostly unoccupied since they were built. The town of Dhanushkodi, India is a ghost town. It was destroyed during the 1964 Rameswaram cyclone and remains uninhabited in the aftermath.
  Many abandoned towns and settlements in the former Soviet Union were established near Gulag concentration camps to supply necessary services. Since most of these camps were abandoned in the 1950s, the towns were abandoned as well. One such town is located near the former Gulag camp called Butugychag (also called Lower Butugychag). Other towns were deserted due to deindustrialisation and the economic crises of the early 1990s attributed to post-Soviet conflicts – one example being Tkvarcheli in Georgia, a coal mining town that suffered a drastic population decline as a result of the War in Abkhazia in the early 1990s.
caption: The town of Namie was evacuated as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster
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